Other countries were saved from
servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian
style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in
recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the
richest national literatures of the world.
It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced
under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind,
which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models,
bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier
and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the
pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more
or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his
humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a
rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain
incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is,
namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national
drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important
examples in this place.[63]
An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future
drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_,
the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two
shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish
society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and
political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak
reign of Enrique IV.
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